Handspring and Palm still together

Handspring announced that it has revised its agreement that enables it to use the Palm OS. Under the terms of the new agreement, the company can use the Palm OS in its products through April 2009. Read more about the agreement here. I'm left wondering if all of the talk about Handspring not using the Palm operating system in the future was all just to get a better licensing deal out of Palm. Oh well. At any rate, the press release also mentioned that Handspring worked with Palm to get USB support and 16-bit color into the Palm OS for the benefit of all licensees. I didn't know that. Palm apparently has a handle on its software but is still struggling with managing its inventory. Perhaps now that it is costing itself a lot of money and embarrassment, it will look closer at becoming a software and services company, leaving the hardware manufacturing and innovating to its licensees.

USER COMMENTS 3 comment(s)

Jeff's comments(10:59am EST Thu Apr 12 2001)From what I understood from comments in a recent interviews, Jeff Hawkins said that there would “almost certainly” be Handspring products based on other OSes as it wanted to be the “leader in all portable computing devices”, while Donna Dubinsky said that “at least 80%” of Handspring products would be Palm OS based. I personally would love to see Symbian or QNX on a subnotebook device with Springboard support. Come to think of it, I'd like to see Symbian on Visors too. . . – by Aaron

Uh-huh(12:47pm EST Thu Apr 12 2001)I agree with Aaron :-) – by IAgree

Palm in Trouble?(2:20pm EST Thu Apr 12 2001)If Palm is having trouble with its inventory and if Palm needed Handspring's help with adding USB and 16-bit color to the OS, Palm doesn't sound like it can manage any aspects of the business well. So why should it focus on software and services?

Ever since Palm announced that it wasn't going to meet investors' expectations, I wondered if Handspring would make a play for Palm at some point. – by